Good idea, roaming data bills capped at £45 UK, 50 Euro.It would certainly would stop the horrific accounts sent out to NZ customers on both networks after accessing the internet while in Aussie or further afield.

Yes, just saw this in another site. It's an interesting idea, seeing our operators don't consider bill shock a problem big enough to make then initiate this by themselves, then regulators need to step in.

As Theresa Gattung said, having confusing price "plans" was part of their strategy for charging lots of money. Their aim was not to keep things simple and honest. It was to trick careless people into paying heaps.

To computers, a megabyte is just another megabyte. The reason to seduce people in with a nice easy toe in the water is to get them in deep enough that the shark can lunge and grab a whole leg when they thought they were enjoying a nice swim in a free ocean.

The actual cost of providing a megabyte of mobile cyberspace around town is less than a cent. The rest of the retail price is made up of huge salaries, absurd employment laws, expense accounts, flim flam marketing costs, wall to wall advertizing, international celebrity endorsements, oligopoly profits, extorquerationate taxation [with GST about to go up some more], jamborees, plush offices in downtown Auckland, mutually high termination charges, transfer pricing, national coverage in uneconomic areas, inefficient spectrum [meaning more base stations are needed], and incompetence.

The answer to high roaming charges is not a government department setting roaming pricing. It's competition. It is a metaphysical certitude that a government department controlling roaming charges will do stupid things which are counterproductive. Some users will benefit and others will suffer. The net outcome will be things made worse. The best thing governments can do is stop providing monopoly support to the businesses which the governments first established as monopolies, such as Telecom.

The dopey pricing authority stopped Vector investing by declaring the "right" profit level that Vector should have. Vector sensibly explained that capital investment was thenceforth cancelled. Now the government is whining that they want fibre all over the place for cyberspace. What's more, the taxpayer will pay for said fibre.

It seems to have escaped their notice that Vector was in the business of installing and operating fibre, as were others. All that was needed was for dopey government departments to get out of the way and stop telling people how much profit they were allowed to make. Unfortunately, Vector is hopeless at selling fibre, wanting to charge absurdly high prices for connections and data [we asked them for a price - they gave us one which was laugable]. Velocity [in Hamilton] also gave a literally laughable price to use their fibre.

Mqurice

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